Students awarded prestigious fellowships for graduate studies

NORTH NEWTON, KAN. – In the past two months, two Bethel College students have received exciting news related to graduate studies.

Guadalupe Gonzalez, a 2014 graduate in psychology and business, has been awarded a Ford Fellowship, one of only about 60 pre-doctoral fellowships given in 2015 across a wide variety of disciplines in research-based fields.

These provide three years of support for individuals engaged in study leading to a Ph.D. or Sc.D. degree.

The National Research Council awards the fellowships on behalf of the Ford Foundation to individuals who “have demonstrated superior academic achievement, are committed to a career in teaching and research at the college or university level, show promise of future achievement as scholars and teachers and are well prepared to use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students.”

The fellowship confers “$24,000 per year for three years, plus some additional benefits,” said Dwight Krehbiel, professor of psychology and Gonzalez’s major adviser. “This is surely one of the most prestigious graduate fellowships for minority students.”

Gonzalez currently works as an admissions counselor at Bethel College and will start doctoral studies at the University of Texas at Austin in cognitive neuroscience next fall.

Earlier in the spring semester, Dylan Jantz, a senior with a double major in mathematics and chemistry and a minor in computer science who will graduate in May, learned he had been accepted into a chemical engineering doctoral program at the University of Kansas.

“This is exciting for Dylan and for Bethel,” said Gary Histand, professor of chemistry (currently on a two-year leave to teach chemistry in China). “Dylan will receive a stipend of $25-30,000 and will have his tuition waived, plus health insurance. It sounds like a good first job, and he gets to earn a Ph.D. along the way.

“This is the way students can do engineering at Bethel,” Histand continued. “Take math, science and computer science classes; do well in them; apply to graduate school. Dylan has worked hard and has the fruit of his labor as a reward.”

“It is very exciting and we are certainly very proud of these students,” said Bethel President Perry White. “The message [is] that our students can go anywhere from here, if they put in the work. They certainly have the faculty support to do so.”

Bethel College is the only private, liberal arts college in Kansas listed in the 2014-15 Forbes.com analysis of top colleges and universities in the United States, and is the highest-ranked Kansas college in the Washington Monthly annual college guide for 2014-15. The four-year liberal arts college is affiliated with Mennonite Church USA. For more information, see www.bethelks.edu.

Back to News Senior Dylan Jantz and 2014 graduate Guadalupe Gonzalez have been awarded major fellowships to pursue doctoral studies at the University of Kansas and the University of Texas-Austin, respectively. …